Edward IV

by Charles Ross

  As might be expected, open defiance of the law was often most flagrant in the more remote parts of the realm. Cornwall was a chronically disturbed county – as it continued to be throughout the Tudor period – and the records of the 1472–5 parliament are full of the lawlessness of the Bodrugans, the Trethewys and Vyvyans, the Glyns and Clemens. These last had a violent feud over their claims to the deputy-stewardship of Cornwall going back to 1469, which culminated in 1472–3 in Thomas Clemens’s killing of John Glyn, a murder so atrocious in its details as to recall the death of Nicholas Radford and the worst days of Henry VI. Yet three years later, Clemens and his two chief accomplices were still at large, for a commission including the ruffianly Henry Bodrugan was appointed to bring them before the king in council. It evidently had no success, for in February 1476 a further commission was needed. Thereafter Clemens disappears from the records, but, as Rowse remarks, ‘if this was the kind of thing a leading person in the county … was responsible for, it may be imagined what was the deterioration of order, the disturbed state of those times’.2

  In Wales, the Marches and the Welsh Border counties, conditions were no better. The government had persistent trouble with several members of the prolific Herbert-Vaughan clan, who were in open defiance of its authority by February 1474. A strong commission was then appointed to array all the king’s lieges in the shires of Hereford, Gloucester and Shropshire against three bastard sons of William Herbert, 1 st earl of Pembroke, and two sons of Roger Vaughan, who had refused to appear before the council for divers offences (probably including the intimidation at Hereford which the commons complained about) and had then withdrawn to Wales and were there stirring up insurrection. Yet they were all still at large in 1478 when they added to their misdeeds by seizing Pembroke Castle and holding it by force.1 In Shropshire, near Oswestry, and further north at Chirk, there was extensive rioting and lawlessness in 1475, requiring commissions of array under the marquis of Dorset and Sir Richard Grey to suppress them.2 The resort to commissions of array – normally used against rebellion or for defence against enemy invasion – emphasizes the scale of these disorders, implying the disruption of a whole countryside.

  The county palatine of Lancaster was another chronically disturbed area. As late as 1479 the justices at Lancaster were ordered to proclaim publicly the king’s intention to have an end to continued ‘misrule and unrestful government’, but three years later there had been no improvement, and the Duchy council pleaded with the king in May 1482 to visit the shire in the hope of ending disturbances which had caused its ‘unrestful rule and governance … to the great impoverishment of the inhabitants’.3 Earlier in the reign the county had been the scene of a violent feud between two leading families, the Stanleys and the Harringtons. The activities of the Harringtons provide a deeply instructive example of the government’s reluctance to take decisive action against its own supporters. The Harringtons were a strongly Yorkist family. Sir Thomas and his eldest son, John, had fallen with Duke Richard of York, leaving as heirs John’s two infant daughters, Anne and Elizabeth, aged five and four. Their wardship and marriage belonged to the king, who in November 1461 granted that of Anne to Geoffrey Middleton, esquire. This, however, reckoned without the desire of Sir Thomas’s younger sons, Sir James and Sir Robert, to keep hold of the family inheritance. Together they took control of the heiresses and held them prisoner, ‘contrary to their wills, in divers places, intending the utter destruction and disinheritance of the said complainants’, as they later claimed. Without any semblance of legality they also seized and retained the girls’ inheritance, including Hornby Castle in Lancashire. Not until 1468 did the king’s attorney sue for them to appear in chancery to answer the charges against them, and both were temporarily placed in the Fleet prison. The king now gave the wardship and marriages of the girls to Thomas, Lord Stanley, who speedily supplied Stanley husbands, and sought to possess himself of their lands. Two successive attempts at arbitration, by Richard Nevill, earl of Warwick, met with no success, and the Harringtons held on. During the Readeption they held Hornby Castle by force against Lord Stanley, and may have had some help from the young duke of Gloucester, who had his own feud with the Stanleys in the spring of 1470.1

  Nothing further was done in the matter until April 1472, when both parties were bound over in large sums to accept an arbitration award, and it is clear from the terms of the bond that the king was taking a personal interest in the affair. This time the decision went against the Harringtons, but they did not give up. A powerful commission headed by Gloucester, Northumberland, Shrewsbury and Hastings was appointed in June 1473 to eject them from Hornby Castle and the rest of the Harrington lands. But a proclamation of August 1473 shows that they were still holding Hornby, having ‘stuffed and enforced it with men and victuals, and habiliments of war’. The king was now clearly very angry, and, faced with his wrath and the might of Gloucester and his fellow-commissioners, the Harringtons at last gave in. No penal action was taken against them, and they continued to prosper in the king’s service. Sir James went on the French expedition in 1475, was M.P. for Lancashire in 1478, and was a knight of the body to Edward from 1475, and his brother, Robert, was M.P. for Lancashire in the 1472–5 parliament when they were still in open defiance of the Crown.

  The explanation for their tender treatment is clear enough. Both were trusted Yorkist servants. James, for example, had been Edward’s first escheator in Yorkshire in 1461, sheriff of the county in 1466–7 and again in 1475–6, and M.P. for Lancashire in 1467–8, had played a leading part in the capture of the fugitive Henry VI in 1465, and was one of the first to join Edward after his landing at Ravenspur in 1471. In the late 1450s and 1460s he had been a retainer and a member of the council of Richard, earl of Warwick, and then, like many other Warwick servants, passed into the service of Duke Richard of Gloucester, whose valued councillor he became. It is scarcely surprising that the king was unwilling to alienate such loyal and long-standing servants, especially when they had high-placed advocates to plead for them.1

  The Harringtons’ reason for defying the law had been no more criminal than an understandable desire to keep their father’s inheritance for themselves. But there were others who exploited their position to pursue actively criminal careers and enrich themselves in the process. For example, Sir Gilbert Debenham of Little Wenham in Suffolk, whose record of violent misdoing extended back into the 1440s, was protected from reprisal by his position as steward of the duke of Norfolk. He survived to prosper under Edward IV, using the ducal influence to penetrate and corrupt the town governments of Ipswich and Colchester for his own benefit. He died peacefully in 1481, a wealthy and successful man, with his son, Sir Gilbert, already established as Edward’s chancellor of Ireland from 1474.2

  The most remarkable, and certainly the most impudently successful, of these licensed malefactors was the Cornishman, Sir Henry Bodrugan. He was one of those notorious wrongdoers denounced by the commons in the parliament of 1459, and his arrest had been ordered in June 1461. Saved by the revolution of 1460–61, he soon established himself as an important royal servant in Cornwall, and acted on a variety of royal commissions, including several to deal with Cornish piracy, a fine opportunity to be gamekeeper and poacher at the same time. By 1473 his misrule in Cornwall had reached such proportions that a whole flock of petitions against him reached parliament from half the gentry of Cornwall, at a time when he was suspected of collusion with the earl of Oxford’s landing at St Michael’s Mount, or, at the least, of turning the situation to his own account. One complaint from Thomas Nevill stated that he could obtain no remedy at common law ‘for if any person would sue against the said Henry and Richard [Bonython] or against any of their servants, anon they should be murdered and slain, and utterly despoiled of all their goods, so that no man dare sue … whereby the said county is lawless and like to be utterly destroyed’. One especially nasty offence alleged against him was that without any authority he had taken upon himself to prove people’
s last testaments and ‘change their last wills damnably’. He then administered their estates, taking for himself all their goods and chattels. The complaints in parliament produced a series of summons against him to appear before the king, which he failed to answer. His lands were thereby forfeited and he was attainted. Yet the following year he succeeded in getting this sentence reversed and in 1476 was knighted by the king at the creation of the prince of Wales. Thereafter he was twice outlawed and pardoned, and yet contrived to continue for the rest of the reign as the most powerful man in Cornwall, heading nearly all the local commissions of array, peace, subsidy assessment, and against piracy – and all this in spite of a steady stream of complaints to the Duchy of Cornwall from those who had suffered, and continued to suffer, from his misdeeds. Only an undue and uncharacteristic commitment to Richard III finally brought about his downfall. His career is the more remarkable in that he seems not to have enjoyed the protection of a powerful patron.1

  There were many Debenhams and Bodrugans abroad in Yorkist England. In the parliament of 1459 the commons denounced some twenty-five persons as notorious malefactors, who had been favoured and assisted by persons of great might: their misdeeds had been ‘to the universal grudge of all your true people’ and if not checked were likely to ‘grow to great inconvenience and mischief irreparable’. These men were not condemned, as has been assumed, because they were Yorkist sympathizers, but because they were a universal nuisance to men of any political sympathy.2 Yet, of those whose careers can be traced, a surprising number were still at large, and apparently unharmed and uncurbed, a decade or more later, among them the ineffable Bodrugan.3 Their immunity reflects the inability of the government to bring such men to heel except by extreme efforts, and even more its unwillingness to proceed against its own servants or the dependants of the mighty. Until much more research has been done on the voluminous though often incomplete legal records of the age, it is hard to support case-histories with reliable statistics. Yet it is difficult to avoid the impression that treason, rebellion, and their incidental violence apart, England was not a noticeably more law-abiding country in 1483 than it had been in 1461, and there was still an alarming incidence of major disturbances of the peace.

  The crucial failure of Edward’s government was its reluctance to make any serious attack on the system of livery and maintenance. The system of retaining by indenture, and its extension into the giving of signs and livery, were the means by which a lord attracted men into his service. Good lordship, in return, implied his protecting his servants and maintaining their quarrels. A body of legislation dealing with these practices already existed by 1461. A distinction between lawful and unlawful maintenance had been made, and the giving of badges and livery of company had been prohibited, except for resident household servants or to a lord’s council or counsel learned in the law, but the practice of retaining men by indenture, even non-resident knights and esquires – the basis of a lord’s local influence – remained lawful.1 Under the articles of 1461, Edward took action against the giving of signs and liveries, by prohibiting lords and all other persons to give liveries to any man, unless he had ‘special commandment by the king to raise people for the assisting of him, resisting of his enemies, or repressing of riots within his land’.2 In the statute of 8 Edward IV, c. 2 (1468), he went much further by declaring the practice of retaining itself to be illegal, except for resident household servants and legal counsel; and there is little doubt that it was meant to apply to lords as well as those of lesser rank.3

  But there is no evidence that the act was ever enforced. It had probably been prompted by the Grey-Vernon dispute in Derbyshire, which had led to three lords – Shrewsbury, Grey of Codnor and Mount-joy – being indicted of having unlawfully given liveries, some as long ago as 1461. But no action was taken against them under the new law, although the case against them was being heard in king’s bench after it had been enacted.4 The statute may have been intended as a warning that retainer was there on sufferance, but it was little more than that. Indeed we have the authority of Chief Justice Hussey for the lords’ casual indifference to it. He had seen (he told his fellow-justices) ‘all the lords sworn to keep and execute that statute which they with others had just drawn up by command of the king himself. And within an hour, while they were still in the Star Chamber, he saw the lords making retainers by oath, and swearing and doing other things contrary to their above-mentioned promises and oaths.’1 It seems likely that both for king and lords the passing of the act of 1468 was little more than a public-relations exercise in response to the importunities of the commons, and they had little intention of enforcing it. Certainly the practice of retaining continued unchecked, often with the express knowledge of the king and the lords. An example is the well-known ‘compact’ about their retainers made by Gloucester and Northumberland in 1474 ‘according to the appointment … by the king’s highness and the lords of his council’.2 No evidence has so far come to light of prosecutions under the act, nor is it likely to (even though much primary material remains to be examined), given Edward’s chosen policy of depending upon his lords and their retainers for the supply of troops, for ‘the rule of the shires’, for the staffing of commissions, and for the packing of parliament. Even under the much more suspicious and tyrannical Henry VII, retainer ‘was regarded as a social evil only when it conflicted with the king’s interests’.3 Edward’s attitude towards the nobility meant that his subjects had to learn to live with ‘a great number of misdoers and the great bearers-up of the same’.

  1 B. H. Putnam, Proceedings Before the Justices of the Peace, Edward III to Richard III, 271. Both the date and the figures are incorrectly cited in Bellamy, Crime and Public Order in England in the Later Middle Ages (1973), 157–8.

  1 Bellamy, op. cit., 158. For the Shropshire and Lincolnshire figures above, E. G. Kimball, ed., The Shropshire Peace Roll, 1400–1414 (Salop County Council, 1959), 41. Records of Some Sessions of the Peace in Lincolnshire, 1381–1396 (Lincoln Record Society, xix, 1955), liii-liv. No other J.P.s’ proceedings for the reign of Edward IV are known to survive except those for Worcestershire, 1477–8 (printed Putnam, 424–34), and the results of the proceedings before them are not known.

  2 See, for example, Storey, End of the House of Lancaster, 153.

  3 Cited by M. E. James, A Tudor Magnate and the Tudor State, 11–12.

  4 J. F. Baldwin, The King’s Council in England during the Middle Ages, 430–1.

  1 Bellamy, op. cit., 101-a, 151–6, 158–9; M. Hastings, The Court of Common Pleas in Fifteenth-Century England (1947), 216–17.

  2 Bellamy, op. cit., 194–7; Storey, op. cit., 37, 165–74 (for Devon), 210–16 (general pardons under Henry VI).

  3 Judith B. Avrutick, ‘Commissions of Oyer and Terminer in Fifteenth-Century England’ (unpublished M.Litt. thesis, London, 1957), p. 158.

  1 See, for example, the pardons obtained by Henry Bodrugan, below, pp. 410–11.

  2 Hastings, op. cit., 224–9.

  3 M. Blatcher, ‘Distress infinite and the contumacious sheriff’, BIHR, xiii (1935–6), 146–50.

  4 1 Edw. IV, c. 2: Statutes of the Realm, II, 389–91.

  5 Storey, op. cit., 180 n.

  1 P.R.O., E 28/89. In 1459 the commons in parliament alleged that amongst other offences twenty-five notorious malefactors denounced by them had disturbed and hindered both the justices of the assize and of the peace (RP, V, 367).

  2 Hastings, op. cit., 221.

  3 P.R.O., E. 28/92; Bellamy, ‘Justice under the Yorkist Kings’, 144.

  4 RP,VI, 159–60.

  1 RP, VI, 173.

  2 Ibid., 39.

  3 Bellamy, Crime and Public Order, 200. Nobles, like M.P.s, enjoyed the privilege of freedom from arrest by the ordinary processes: Hastings, op. cit., 170.

  1 Storey, ‘The north of England’, in Fifteenth-Century England, 132; End of the House of Lancaster, 118; John Harding, Chronicle, ed. Ellis, 378.

  2 Year Book 1 Hen. VII, Mich. no. 3, fol.
3, printed by C. H. Williams, English Historical Documents, V, 533.

  3 For customs control and piracy, see above, pp. 366–7, 384–5.

  1 S. B., Henry VII, 191–3.

  2 Storey, End … of Lancaster, 27.

  3 Above, chapter 3, section i.

  1 RP, V, 487–8. Other articles prohibited dicing and card-playing, and made anyone who renounced his allegiance after being pardoned by the king guilty of high treason.

  2 W. Stubbs, Constitutional History (1878), III, 283–3.

  1 M. H. Keen, ‘Treason Trials under the Law of Arms’, TRHS, 5th ser., xii (196a), 85–103; Bellamy, ‘Justice under the Yorkist Kings’, 139–43; Bellamy, The Law of Treason in England in the Later Middle Ages, 158–63.

  2 Bellamy, op. cit., 158–63; Lander, Conflict and Stability, 100.